Matt Owen
Matt Owen is Head of Social Media at Econsultancy. He looks after Econsultancy’s global social media strategy and architecture, where he has led community engagement and growth since 2010.
Matt has a background in music, film and television in addition to marketing, and was instrumental in building the UK's largest entertainment blog network before moving into dedicated social management and strategy for one of the world's largest business schools before joining Econsultancy. He has a particular interest in social measurement and organizational integration.
In addition, he works with a community of 200,000+ digital marketers daily across a variety of social channels and has written best practice guides for popular social platforms. He contributes regularly to the Econsultancy blog, industry titles and makes regular appearances at events and conferences.
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For the last week or so Facebook has been displaying ‘Reach’ figures on page posts. There seems to be a bit of misunderstanding around these so I thought I’d take a minute to clear things up, and delve into the realms of user behaviour a little at the same time.
The Reach metric is being displayed because Facebook wants to promote its new Promoted Posts feature.
Promote your post and Facebook tells you that you can reach more of your fans (for a fee, natch). The jury is still out on how effective these promotions are, but I’d assume that they are at least as effective as Facebook ads, and are targeted to a slightly more relevant audience.
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by Matt Owen
18 June 2012 09:39am
26 comments
One of my regular tasks is to run through the comments on the Econsultancy blog and sweep up any spam comments.
We currently use a learning filter, so while it does let through the odd comment shilling pneumatic lubrication while simultaneously blacklisting reasoned, in-depth comments about SEO, by manually updating it, it gets better (at least, that’s the theory).
Checking out all the comments is also extremely useful for me, as it gives me a daily digest of what users are talking about, what their consensus is and which issues are of importance to them in general.
We all benefit from this as we can use it to make our content more relevant.
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by Matt Owen
28 May 2012 11:04am
2 comments
Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending even more time than usual on Facebook, putting together a new update to our report: Facebook Pages for Business: A Best Practice Guide.
It’s been a mammoth task, with Facebook in an almost constant state of flux over the past 12 months.
The Facebook Pages for Business guide contains over 80 new examples, and includes details on optimising the Timeline, guides to daily admin and tracking success, advice on creating and communicating with audiences, optimising your page to help with search and brand positioning, usage and demographic stats, and case studies of a variety of businesses, from niche B2Bs to global FMCGs.
The report has been designed to take you through every aspect of Facebook, from clicking 'create a page' to advanced f-commerce and beyond.
It reflects the sheer scale of Facebook, and should help to counter all of the outdated information that's available, something I know from first hand experience to be incredibly frustrating.
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by Matt Owen
01 May 2012 11:27am
0 comments
Every month, Econsultancy publishes a range of reports covering best practice, market data, template files, trends and innovation and more. In short; loads of useful stuff.
Econsultancy members (Silver and above) have access to all our reports free of charge, but as our research team is currently firing on all cylinders, I thought it would be useful for new members (and existing ones) to have a quick roundup of everything we’ve published in the past month.
This month we published seven new reports and updates, including the Internet Statistics Compendium, The Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Census, our new SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide, a B2B trends briefing, a display advertising best practice guide and more.
Hit the jump to discover what's new:
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by Matt Owen
02 April 2012 16:33pm
0 comments
Facebook’s new Timeline format doesn’t officially go live for brand pages until March 30th, but there’s always a few who can’t wait to try new things out. In fact, 8m have already made the switch.
Timeline marks a fundamentally different approach to marketing on Facebook for many brands, with more emphasis on images and genuine engagement on the wall.
We asked our Facebook fans and Twitter followers to help us highlight some of the best examples of cover photos, milestones, and general best practice we could find.
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by Matt Owen
26 March 2012 13:50pm
28 comments
Recently I’ve been looking a lot more closely at the B2B field, and I’ve noticed that a lot of businesses in the sector are still at the ‘testing the waters’ stage as far as social media goes.
This isn’t true across the board of course, there’s plenty of large B2Bs doing some wonderful stuff, but it struck me that there wasn’t a lot of beginner-level knowledge out there for B2B’s starting out in social media.
The reason I’ve avoided writing about the topic for a while is that most of this has probably been covered in articles we’ve published previously, but it’s always handy to have a quick glance at the principles of what we do and why we do it, and every week more people decide to take the plunge, so hopefully this will help them out as well.
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by Matt Owen
07 March 2012 13:33pm
12 comments
After several weeks of speculation, Facebook today unveiled admin previews of its Timeline for brand pages update.
Speculators (including more than a few in the Econsultancy office) have seen the move as inevitable for some time. Here’s a quick run through of the changes, highlighting the most important points.
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by Matt Owen
29 February 2012 14:48pm
4 comments
Econsultancy will be hosting our 2012 Innovation Awards at the Park Lane Hilton in London this evening.
In the run-up to the glittering award ceremony, we’ve been speaking to our shortlisted candidates to get their take on all aspects of innovation in business.
We’ve looked at fostering the right kind of environment to get those ideas flowing, budgeting make sure plans don’t impact your bottom line, and looked back at some great ideas to help get you inspired.
Of course, even a great idea can be outdone. The industry has never advanced as quickly as it does today, with some truly awe-inspiring ideas rolling out every day.
With all this competition to factor in, we thought we’d close our series by asking our nominees about keeping ahead of the innovation curve.
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by Matt Owen
23 February 2012 12:34pm
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Over the past month we’ve spoken a lot about the nature of innovation in business, and during the course of these posts we’ve looked at ways to foster an innovative spirit within your company, as well as justifying the cost and protecting the budget.
But what if you aren’t the one who ultimately has to pay if your ground-breaking new ideas don’t make the cut?
A large number of our Innovation Awards entries come from agencies, which have to work doubly hard to justify unusual or experimental campaign choices, yet still manage to deliver some of the most exciting new ideas every year.
In today’s Innovation Question , we look more closely at exactly how they manage this.
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by Matt Owen
22 February 2012 10:59am
1 comment
As we learned in our previous post, our Innovation Awards shortlist candidates all thought that an ability to learn from past mistakes was just as important as a vision of the future when trying to advance your business.
It’s not always mistakes we learn from though, and business innovation is as much about evolution as revolution.
Today we’re asking our expert panel which companies, products and ideas from the past have truly inspired them, and which ones they wished they’d had a hand in…
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by Matt Owen
20 February 2012 14:11pm
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